Carandiru was Brazil's largest prison, a grim enclosure that worked as a brutal self-regulating microcosm of the world outside it. The film is seen thru' the eyes of a doctor who gets to know the prisoners, drug dealers, rapists, murderers, remandees et al, and we get to know some of them thru' flashbacks to their pre-prison life. This is the story of how these men's time shuddered to a halt when riot police entered the compound in October 1992 and shot dead 111 unarmed prisoners. From the direc find out more...

1943; Hungary is one of the last nations to have its Jewish population rounded up and sent to the Nazi death and labour camps. This is the semi-autobiographical story of one 14-year-old boy and his tale of survival from deportation to Buchenwald and on through liberation and the culture shock of his return to Budapest. Told without resort to emotion we follow our hero and others cling on to what scraps of humanity that they can against the total horror surrounding them. Lajos Koltai's film ranks find out more...

Bobby Sands was the IRA member who led the 1981 Long Kesh hunger strike as part of a campaign to achieve the status of political prisoners and not that of criminals. The first section of film deals with daily prison life, the 'dirty' protest and the violence, the second is a long discussion on the meaning of life with a sympathetic priest and the third depicts the last weeks and death of a man voluntarily dying of starvation. find out more...

The frightening story of a naive young American caught smuggling hashish out of Turkey and sentenced to years inside a particularly vicious prison regime. The despair and desolation are brought home brutally. John Hurt is magnificent as the eccentric British prison veteran. find out more...

The tale of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's last official executioner, a man who personally dispatched 608 men and women, including various Nazi war criminals, Timothy Evans and Ruth Ellis. Timothy Spall superbly pulls off how this rather ordinary, but distinctly odd, bloke coped emotionally and professionally with his job. An awesome period piece and a superb look into a very strange occupation. A must for anyone who liked Vera Drake. find out more...

Australia's dark secret of institutionalist eugenics gets an impressive and heartfelt celluloid airing in this adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara's book, a story based around the astonishing real life journey of three young girls, removed from their true Aboriginal families and transplanted to a boarding school/prison to be trained as domestic servants (from whence it was hoped they would quietly blend into white society), and their 1,500 mile trek home with only a rabbit proof fence to gui find out more...

The incredible true story of Dieter Dengler, a German-born US pilot shot down over Laos at the beginning of the Vietnam war and held captive in a beastly POW camp, and his subsequent escape to 'freedom'. find out more...

Sophie Scholl was a member of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi resistance group based in Munich University, 1943. Sophie and her brother are captured during a dangerous mission to distribute pamphlets on campus. Unwavering in her convictions and loyalty to her comrades, her cross-examination by a Gestapo officer quickly escalates into a searing test of wills as Scholl delivers a passionate call to freedom and personal responsibility. Armed with long-buried historical records of her incarceration, di find out more...

Starting with the murder in an Afghan prison of an innocent taxi-driver by American soldiers, this brilliant documentary outlines the lines of command from Cheney and Rumsfeld down to those on the front line. We learn about the techniques of torture and who authorised which methods. We hear about some of the history of CIA torture methods, the irrelevance of torture to extracting information and its use as a weapon of terror and political posturing by those in power in Washington. find out more...

The Magdalene Laundries are a peculiarly twisted Irish Catholic institution; run by nuns they provide a form of incarceration for fallen young women, whose heinous crimes range from being raped to flirting with boys. Margaret, Bernadette and Rose are three new inmates about to experience first hand woman's inhumanity to woman as they are humiliated, degraded, abused and worked to the bone, but despite the grimness of their world the three girls find solace and even humour in the company of each find out more...